Comment by doginasuit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by doginasuit | Hacker News Reader

I've thought about something like this. When there is a lot of stuff happening at once, it's a mistake to try and communicate it all with text. Agents use tools, reference databases, reference the web, interact with other agents, and spend time processing the information. When you have several agents operating at the same time, communicating what they are doing using some kind of spatial map is a really smart idea.

The office is a decent analog for such a map. Referencing a database? That operation along with processing the information takes a little bit of time. During the interval, have the avatar move to a file cabinet and back to their desk. Have their computer screen change when they access web resources. If they use a particular tool, it can be represented somewhere in the room and used the same way. Interacting with another agent can be similarly represented.

Symbolizing the operation of the agent with movement and behavior is a great way to give an overview. It would support a much richer intuition for how they are accomplishing a task. It wouldn't even need to be a game UI for people who will have a hard time feeling like they are doing serious work while watching what appears to be a game, but that wouldn't bother me.

It is nice to see folks experimenting widely with unique visual representations of agent orchestration, as a consequence of the bottom-up / individual-led development that's driving the industry (inasmuch as it exists yet).

There are folks young enough now that they've never known anything other than "the desktop" (or CLI) as a computing metaphor.

But there's no fundamental reason a metaphor has to be anything specific... it should be whatever is most widely comprehensible and efficient for the problem space.

LLMs remade Clippy. This sounds like using Microsoft Bob to manage them.

Imagine how much more infuriated people would have been if Clippy wasn't a cartoonish-looking paperclip, but a human facsimile.

Sometimes absurdity or comedy is the point when you're developing a known-partial solution.

You are correct this is interesting but it is still quite obviously the wrong UI. For the same reason https://www.gather.town/ ends up being a waste of time.

It's been done before with LLMs. In both cases - human and LLM - trying to "visualize" what people are working on by having a topdown office view is a complete waste of time. It would be like thinking by strolling into a random office IRL and surveying people with their heads down at a random moment you will unlock some great insight.

It's cute. But it's just that. If you want to actually understand some of the things you highlight here there are far more accessible and efficient ways. Like take any data plot or visual graph.

An office is simply the wrong map. It also misses the nature of the joke in The Office. No one is really getting work done. Their work is boring and sucks, no one cares. The whole show is essentially the domino effect of Michael as a rouge agent. They have many scenes where a new character comes in and sees the whole office. It appears normal. Yet after this moment some chaos quickly begins to brew. My point is unless you are planning for a Michael to go haywire, the entire concept of an office is completely uninteresting and tedious. You may as well just use a spreadsheet.

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